Players watching the announcement trailer for the remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered in April were delighted to learn they could buy it the same day. The game has been a massive hit, breathing fresh life into one of Bethesda’s classics. While the remaster deserves its high praise, however, it is not without some hiccups. Recently, players have become aware of a serious Oblivion Remastered bug that can slowly break the game.
What is the Oblivion Remastered Bug?
The report about the bug that gradually breaks Oblivion Remastered originally came from Digital Foundry. According to Digital Foundry, the longer one plays Oblivion Remastered, the more its performance drops. This decline in performance is evident in decreasing frame rates.
Three things noted to make the performance drops worse include:
- Playing
- Traveling from area to area
- Cycling through saves
We list “playing” because simply playing the game at all results in decreased performance. The difference can be detected within just 15 minutes of starting a fresh playthrough.
Another weird issue that some players are noticing is that when they are riding a horse, the camera position is higher than it is supposed to be. This is also tied to the same performance problem.
The current theory from Digital Foundry is that the Oblivion Remastered performance bug is the result of a memory leak.
In addition to these performance degradations, Oblivion Remastered is crashing outright for some players. This typically happens when loading a save, particularly one that has been accessed repeatedly in the past.
Bethesda Has Not Yet Released a Fix for this Oblivion Remaster Bug
Although the performance problems with Oblivion Remastered are annoying, we cannot say we are surprised. Bethesda has a long history of buggy games. Consider the notoriously buggy launch of Fallout 76, for example.
And don’t even get us started on how many bugs there were in Bethesda games on older consoles. Skyrim crashed frequently on PlayStation 3. As for Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, both games also suffered from performance degradation over time. Though in the cases of those two games, the issue seemed to have more to do with the hardware not being able to handle the increasing complexity of data over the course of long playthroughs.
As of the time of this writing, Bethesda has not yet patched the current Oblivion Remastered bug. Hopefully they will soon, because the performance drop issues and save-related crashes are very annoying.
Oblivion Remastered is a Huge Success
For gamers slogging through the stress of 2025, the sudden combined announcement and release of Oblivion was like a breath of fresh air. Gamers are used to very long wait times these days between announcements and games actually coming out. So, it was exciting to be able to immediately play a game after watching the announcement trailer.
Within a week, Oblivion became the third-best-selling game of 2025 in the US to date, boasting over 4 million players. The $50 price tag was no deterrent. Oblivion gave players what they desperately yearned for this year—a nostalgic return to simpler times, but with a major overhaul providing a fresh experience of a beloved classic.
Meanwhile, there is still very little news or information about Elder Scrolls VI, which was announced years ago. Although the wait for ES VI is seemingly endless, Oblivion Remastered is a massive game that can provide many hours of enjoyment. It is just what we need to get us through the wait.